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Yesterday, I have noticed one little unpleasant detail in my otherwise perfect iPhone 3G. One bad pixel in top left area of the screen. Just one black dot that never changes its color and just stays the same black pixel forever.

Called Softbank today (my mobile operator) - these guys are clueless! Told me they'll get in touch with me but it never happened. Also called Apple support line and was redirected to Softbank with all the exchange inquiries.

So during lunch I just decided why not have a little trip to Apple store here in Nagoya, because it never hurts to check (in America, people can get their iPhones exchanged right in Apple stores).

And oh miracle! My iPhone WAS exchanged right at the Genius bar counter! The guy over the counter had a look at the screen - "Ah.. yeah I see". Then told me that he has to check Apple's policy regarding bad pixels on iPhones - and there's zero-tolerance in this regard, so you can get your iPhone exchanged even for one dead pixel. Then he checked the inventory, and there was the same model I have! The iPhone came in plain brown box though, not the stylish Apple package - definitely a sign that these units are for replacements only.

I received the unit, asked if I can check the screen for bad pixels - and there were none! I few mins later I was going out of the store with my new, replaced iPhone.

I had my doubts if the same approach that works in the USA, will work in Japan - and I'm very happy to confirm that it does!

Thanks Apple!

..is mine!

and I'm Softbank's slave for next 2 years.. Well.. at least I didn't have to sell my soul ;)

(iPhone will be sold starting July 11, via Softbank. Pricing yet unknown)

Go Apple go! Show these Sharps and Toshibas how to create a really useful stuff, not the feature-ridden, hardly usable locked to death junk they're producing :D

I _finally_ got a new Mac at work today :) A nice 2.8MHz Code Duo 2 with 4Gigs of RAM! Now I can have Windows and OS X running at the same time without swearing at endless swapping (hopefully) :)

Good news, everyone (yeah, I'm in the middle of Futurama right now) - WebKit is at 100% on Acid3 test!

You can get the latest nightly build here and try it yourself!

This is great news, since WebKit is used not only on Macs, Windows, but is also the HTML rendering engine on millions of iPhones and iPod Touches (sure, since they use Safari as the web browser), as well as a web browse for Nokia S60 and last, but definitely not the least, it is the HTML rendering engine in Adobe's Air AND Google's Adnroid mobile platform.

I just wish my Sharp 920sh had a usable web browser…

It's been several years already since Apple have added ability to order prints directly from iPhoto application, but hm.. I just don't need to print anything in any decent quality, usually. However, our family friends had a wedding and we have decided to give them a personalized calendar as a little after-wedding present.

So, we (my wife, actually) fired up iPhoto, and created a little calendar for a year.

Press the Buy Calendar button, and we had a little package delivered to our doors in exactly 8 days.

It actually took that long because we're in Japan, and the order was printed and shipped from the USA.

A standard hanging wall calendar. There's only one variation, actually  - at least if you order from Japan.

The quality of both prints and paper are very nice.

And yeah, of course we have a little printed proof of Apple ego on the back ;)

Overall, I'm pretty satifsied with the calendar, though there are a couple of places where fonts went crazy (small calendars in empty calendar cells, not all of them, just a couple). That's because I guess Apple doesn't actually expect for months names to be written in Russian ;) Japanese stuff printed out just fine, as well as most of Russian letters, and of course English letters are the most perfect.

This will make a great gift, with very few time spent on it, and relatively cheap (around $30 USD including shipping) . I will definitely have this service on my gift radar in the future.

Excuse me for a completely non-technical post :) I'll come up with something soon I think.

I have faced a little problem today when I needed to merge two folders' contents, but with a little trick.

Basically, I usually work on projects using Subversion, so I always keep track of what's changed, but sometimes I have to give the files to third party for various  - usually design or content - enhancements. The problem is that I usually just don't have time/will/both to explain how Subversion (of version control systems, for that matter) works, and just handle exported files to the third party. This approach removes version control from files, but when I get the modified files back, I want them back into Subversion structure - this way I can see what exactly was changed, as well as have a ground to blame a specific person if some parts which should have not be touched, were actually touched and some part of the system broke in the result.

So, in order to that kind of trick, I need to merge "new" un-versioned directory structure into "old" versioned one, replacing all old files with new ones, but keeping my previous .svn directories.

You can't do folders merging using Mac OS X Finder, as well as I haven't found a good way to do that using FileMerge utility from Developer Tools. But there is actually an easy way to achieve the required result - and the tool for it is good old tar utility.

The way tar works during un-archiving is that is actually merges files and folders, and doesn't replace them. So, if directories on your hard drive and inside the .tar archive have the same name, the directories on your hard drive won't get erased and then replaced with stuff from .tar, but rather have their contents and contents of .tar directories merged. Just what I need.

Here's what you need to do to merge stuff.

We have two directories: project_trunk is a versioned directory, project_changed is the un-versioned directory we received from third-party. These directories are located on the same level so we can go between them with "cd ../project_trunk" or "cd ../project_changed" commands.

Open Terminal application and to the following:

cd /path/to/project_changed
tar cf  allfiles.tar *
mv allfiles.tar ../project_trunk
cd ../project_trunk
tar xvf allfiles.tar
rm allfiles.tar

You're done! The un-versioned directory structure was successfully merged into the versioned one.

Now just do svn status on the project_trunk directory and compare changes and commit. Very fast and easy :)

82%How Addicted to Apple Are You?Thought I'm just a little bit over 100 ;)

Even since betas of Firefox 2, I had constant unexpected freezes of the browser, at least once on 1-2 hours of normal use (usually the uptime was not longer than 10-15 minutes during heavy lifting).

That, considering excellent stability of Firefox 1.5, was very very annoying. I thought may be it release candidates or the release version itself will fix the problem, but RCs came and gone, and even the release version of the browser was as freeze-prone as early betas.

I tried to delete user profiles and create new ones, delete preferences - without any results. Then I have started to turn off extensions (I had lots of them), leaving only the ones I can't live without, and which I thought I can trust 100%. These extensions happen to be: WebDeveloper, FireBug, Google Toolbar for Firefox and Google Browser sync. But no matter what, even with this limited extensions set, freezes continues at their usual annoying level.

…until one day when I was desperately searching for a solution to the problem again, and found a post in which the poster suggested removing Google Toolbar for Firefox extension in order to get rid of crashes. "Huh? Google's toolbar?", - I though. "Isn't Google's software pretty good and polished to be a source of such a horrible problem?". But I eventually gave it a try. I removed Google Toolbar for Firefox extension from both computers I use (Intel-based iMacs, one at home and one at work) - and I could barely believe my eyes - the freezes just stopped. I'm living my 3rd day without ANY freezes at all!

Now.. I'm not sure if Google Toolbar causes these problems on any machines it is installed on, or is this problem only Mac-version specific, or may be I live right in the middle of some anomaly which causes Google Toolbar to behave in such a way, but all I can say is that :

removing Google Toolbar extension resolved Firefox 2 freezes for me

so you might also give this solution a try if you have similar problems with Firefox 2 constantly freezing on you.

In my previous entry regarding "SSH Login without entering password" I have wrote about how to make it easier to login into SSH servers.

It's all nice, works, and makes life easier. But if you are a Mac user who uses Transmit to log into SFTP servers, there is one very nice side-effect of the technique described in the forementioned entry. You can actually log into your SFTP servers by just typing a server's address, and with not need to enter password, or even login name!

Here's how I connect to my SFTP server:

And after clicking the Connect button…

Voila! No login name, and no password, but I was logged into a server which actually does require a login name, and the password is actually more than 10 characters!

How does it work? Well actually, SFTP connection is a connection using the same mechanism which is used to do an SSH connection (you use the same login and password for both). And Transmit uses the standard OS built-in functions to do this connection. Therefore, once you have set up your computer to be able to login into remote SSH server without entering password, you automatically gain ability to use Transmit to log into the same server using SFTP protocol!

There's one catch though. I have told you that you don't need to enter login name, but actually it is not true :) A name is required in order to login, but if you don't specify it, your current login name is used (which is "mike" in my case), and if login name on remote server is the same as your local one (and it happens that remote server's login name is "mike" too), you are just fine with the default values.

But what you are to do if, say, your local name is "mike", and you have setup an SSH key for, say, server "example.com" as "hosting@example.com" (ie, the user name on the remote hosting is "hosting", and not "mike)? Well, you can override the defaults, and specify which default name you want to use when connecting to which server. In order to do that, you have to edit contents of ~/.ssh/config file (you have to create it if it doesn't exist). For the case above, the contents of the ~/.ssh/config file should read

Host example.com
User hosting

This way, when you connect to the host "example.com" without specifying user name, the default user name "hosting" will be used (thanks to Dave Teare for this hint).

And of course, you can always just specify user name in the Transmit connection window :)

That's it :) Happy name-less and password-less SFTPing ;)